Five Best Practices To Manage Project PDF

THE
5 BEST
PRACTICES
TO MANAGE
PROJECT
RESOURCES
EFFECTIVELY
5 Best Practices to Manage Project Resources Effectively
Table of Contents
E
Introduction 3
Allocating resources 4
Resource leveling 9
Know who’s doing what 12

Track project progress 15
Future forecasting: 19
capacity and demand
Contact us 23
Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 2

Resource management
is a many-headed beast.
Pick any popular project methodology or process you like, and one of the biggest deciders of
project success comes down to how effectively you manage your resources. Misallocate your
people, overshoot your budget, and you’re in big trouble. Do it right, and you’re a hero.
In multi-project organizations, resources are typically fully work-loaded, assigned to a range of

projects and tasks with little or no breathing space in between. Then more work arrives, which
has to be shoe-horned into the plan without overheating schedules and overloading people.
Something has to give—delivery dates, budgets, schedules—not exactly a recipe for project or
professional success.
But it doesn’t have to be this way! Managing your resources can be an integrated part of your
project planning and scheduling process—before and during the life of a project. Which means
you can do a few things at once: plan for the future, manage the present, anticipate risks, and
prepare for changes and uncertainty. All of this translates to delivering a high-quality project
on time and within budget.
In this white paper we’re going to:
Address common resource management challenges.
Provide solutions for managing people and money resources, and integrating
them into your project schedule
Show you how LiquidPlanner, a resource-driven project management tool,
supports all these important resource management solutions.

ALLOCATING
RESOURCES

Allocating resources
Set up a resource pool. Establish availability and cost. Assign work.
Manager 1: “Can I borrow Tim for the next couple of weeks to help out
the design team? He told me he has some free time.”
Manager 2: “My schedule says that he’s booked. And his name’s Tom.”
The challenge
Allocating resources effectively and accurately is one of the biggest challenges
going into any project. No team is going to have a smooth project experience
when the project managers don’t know how their team members and budgets
have been allocated.
One of the big problems project teams face is that there’s no shared location
that shows how and where resources are deployed. Plus, there isn’t the right
data associated with each resource. So the act of allocating resources becomes
a very non-scientific guessing game—bad for the project and bad for business.
What matters
What you need is a system, or process, that shows you where and how your
resources are allocated through the lifecycle of your project—from the
planning phases all the way to delivery. This way you can steer your team
and their work through obstacles and change requests as they come up—
ALLOCATING adding and subtracting resources as needed. Having insight into how your
RESOURCES resources are allocated lets you respond quickly, make strategic decisions,
and keep stakeholders updated when those unforeseeable project risks
and uncertainties make themselves known. All of this raises your chances of
delivering projects when you say you will. And that’s good for business.

What works
One of the most effective ways to allocate resources is by using a collaborative
project management tool. And then, ideally, you want a platform that
integrates resource management into the scheduler, and lets you set up the
cost of services going out and coming in for all team members. This means
that all of your project schedules would be based on accurate resource
availability, and as schedules change you can immediately see the budget
impact.
Set up a centralized resource pool.

First, you want to establish a single, centralized, shared resource pool in which
all plans and schedules are based. When doing so, include the following
two important pieces of information for everyone who’s using your project
management tool: cost of use and availability.
Cost of use. After you set up your resource pool, give a monetary
amount on everything that’s going out and coming in. When you
allocate cost of use for every person working on the project, you can
see if you’re running over or under budget on your projects.
Availability. To have a realistic view of your team’s availability, start

by establishing how many hours a day or week each team member is
really available for project work. And remember: Even when resources
are allocated full-time to a project, they’ll rarely spend all their time
working on it, as they’ll have non-project demands on their time. And
even our superstars can’t be in two places at once or work 24/7/365;
so be realistic if you want to avoid overly optimistic scheduling—and
ALLOCATING
burnt out employees.
RESOURCES

Using LiquidPlanner to allocate resources

LiquidPlanner’s resource-driven scheduling engine automatically adjusts task
start dates according to every team member’s availability—including vacation,
holidays, recurring events, etc.
Here are some ways LiquidPlanner helps you manage resource allocation:
Availability: Everyone has a default setting of eight hours of

availability in their profile setting. Individuals can reset their hours
to reflect their available project hours outside of other activities such
as meetings, going on sales calls, taking Wednesdays off, etc. The
scheduling engine always considers these figures when updating
your plan.
Cost of use: LiquidPlanner lets you set Pay Rules and Billing Rules for
all project work and team members. This way, you can see how much
you’re paying out for each resource and how much you’re bringing in.
So you don’t just get the who’s who for your project, you also get the
most valuable how much.
ALLOCATING
RESOURCES

Once this information is set up, the numbers are automatically

calculated for work done and work remaining. This can then be
included in your financial metrics based on data entered by the team.
Assign work.
It’s a simple thing, assigning work—or so you’d think. But how often does
someone assign work by saying, “Hey Tom, can you take on this task?”—then
stashes that information in a spreadsheet and hope for the best? The results
aren’t optimal.
To be an affective resource allocator, you need to account for all the work being
done, i.e., put names to every task, and make sure that work is distributed.
In other words, no task that has been approved should remain unassigned.
Part of managing resources effectively is making sure that all team members
know what their expectations and priorities are, exactly what needs to be
accomplished, and who’s responsible for getting which tasks done.
ALLOCATING
RESOURCES

RESOURCE
LEVELING

Resource leveling
Don’t over-commit your resources. Know your priorities.
Manager: “Can you jump on this task Tom? It’s our #1 priority.”
Tom: “Sure. Do you want it done before or after the other #1 priorities?”
The challenge
Effective project leads don’t fire tasks out in scattergun style, announce
everything as the number-one priority and see what happens. When team
members are over-assigned, and aren’t clear on what their priorities are,
productivity and morale tanks. And let’s not talk about budget overruns that
happen with this shoot-from-the-hip planning style. In short, when you don’t
have a resource leveling process in place, you have no way to control how and
if your project comes in on time and on budget.
What matters
Resource levelling is the necessary process of balancing the workload of your
resources (people, budgets, materials, etc.) over the course of a project. The
right project management tool will calculate every team member’s schedule
by looking at what needs to be done, how it’s prioritized, and their availability
to complete the work that’s been assigned. Using this type of tool means you
RESOURCE always have an updated view into how your time, cost and scope aligns with
LEVELING
your start and finish dates. Plus, everyone on the team has clear expectations
on their priorities every single day.

What works
Let’s say you have all of your current and future projects set up, assigned and
prioritized in your project management tool. Change requests can happen
fast, so updates have to be easy. You need know where you stand every time
you go into your project plan and make any necessary changes.
As the project gets underway and changes inevitably occur, you’ll probably
need to reprioritize some of the work items. Resource leveling is a way to
continue updating your project in a way that makes sure resources are being
used as effectively and accurately as possible, no matter what the project
scenario might be.
Using LiquidPlanner for resource leveling

LiquidPlanner is a priority-driven scheduling engine that takes a resource’s
availability and workload into account when calculating start and finish dates.
Consequently, a LiquidPlanner schedule is always resource leveled. Project
leaders still have to identify task dependencies like in any other system, but
that’s just good schedule development. LiquidPlanner automatically balances
the work assigned to team members. All you have to do is:
Add your tasks.
Provide best/worst case effort estimates.
Assign a team member, or have them assign themselves to the task.
Repeat.
RESOURCE
LEVELING

KNOW WHO’S
DOING WHAT

Know who’s doing what

Get the right view of your project world.
Project manager: “Hey. Remind me who’s doing the user

documentation updates on your new web project?”
Team member: “It’s Alex. No wait – it’s Bill. Actually – not sure. Doc?
Grumpy? Happy? Snee—”
Project manager: “Yeah don’t worry about it. I’ll just go ask around.”
The challenge
If you’re managing multiple projects, or large complex ones, it gets difficult
to see which team members are doing what, and when. As a manager, this is
something you need to have a detailed grasp of. If not, you’re back to herding
cats, missing deadlines, adjusting budget overruns and other catastrophes.
What matters
You need the right kind and amount of information on hand at all times,
and you need it quickly. You also need a way to deliver filtered project data
efficiently. Nobody wants to be weighed down by more details than they need.
For example, project managers will be more concerned with individual tasks,
KEEP TRACK how they’re distributed and prioritized. Team leaders and senior management
OF WHO’S are looking at higher-level stats such as delivery dates, resource distribution,
DOING WHAT
budgets and keeping the client informed of how the project is going.

What works
You want a project management system that gives you real-time data to
track resources, and then lets you filter this information up the chain. When
everyone knows the big picture and can see what’s coming, the project
transforms from being a hell-on-wheels endeavour to one that is filled with
illuminating solutions.
Get resource information with LiquidPlanner.

LiquidPlanner’s resource management features give you multiple ways to
access and filter down to specific resource data. Here’s what you can do:
Get a quick-scrolling view of who’s assigned to every task—in your

project and workspace.
Filter to a single person or team to see a list of assigned tasks.
Get the long view of what your team is working on. See who needs
to have work taken off their plate, who’s available to take it on, who’s
making deadlines, etc.
View day-by-day work allocation for your team over whatever period
you specify to identify risks.
Here’s an example of a Resource Workload Report that shows how a software

development team is booked over the course of a month, and where the risks fall:
KEEP TRACK
OF WHO’S
DOING WHAT

TRACK
PROJECT
PROGRESS

Track project progress

Take the guesswork out of the work. Have a clear sense of work
completed and work remaining.
Project Manager: “How’s your work coming along?”
Team Member: “Okay I guess.”
Project Manager: “So you’re on schedule?”
The challenge
There’s a very satisfying point at the start of a project when a plan is in place,
the work has been allocated and everyone on the team is raring to go. This is
also the point when things get tricky. The challenge now is to stay on a focused,
productive and profitable path. If you don’t have a way to track the progress
of both the work accomplished and what’s remaining, you risk mismanaging
resources, going over budget and delivering projects late. All of this can spell
disaster for your organization, your team and your career. Ouch, right?
What matters
But—when you have the tools to track how resources align with your project’s
workflow, it’s almost like having your own project management crystal ball! You
can track progress and forecast work remaining without the guessing, chaos
and doubts. Then you have access to reports that show you both the hours
TRACK worked on cumulative tasks as well as the hours of work remaining—which is
PROJECT
gold for anyone managing or leading a project with high stakes.
PROGRESS

What works
Having a widely-used time tracking tool is imperative to getting a realistic
and updated picture of project progress. Then, you want to regularly review
your progress as your project moves forward through all the exciting ups and
downs. There are some tricks to the trade here too, for example: Just because
a task has used up 50 percent of its original budget, it doesn’t mean that it’s
half complete. The right tool will show you what this scenario looks like.
To set yourself up, you need the following information and tools:
A time tracking system that people use
An easy way for people to set timers to associated tasks
A view of how much time everyone is spending on each task
Get all this data to integrate with your scheduling system, and it’s easy to keep
track of project progress.
Using LiquidPlanner to track progress

LiquidPlanner makes tracking time a reality in your organization for a couple of
reasons:
The timesheet is integrated into the scheduling engine.
The timers make it easy to track time to all project tasks.
It’s vital to have time tracking data in order to allocate, manage and plan
resources accurately (or even at all.)
Here are some of the ways that LiquidPlanner helps project managers keep
TRACK track of their resources throughout the lifecycle of projects:
PROJECT
PROGRESS Timesheets are fully integrated with the LiquidPlanner project
management environment.
Task timers make it easy to track time as you do the actual work.

Your remaining effort is always current. Whenever you log progress,

the effort of the task is automatically decremented, which also rolls up
to the entire project. This means the schedule is always up to date.
Schedule alerts. LiquidPlanner also provides some visual cues (a fire

icon) to alert the team to certain risks that may come into play as a
project progresses.
Analytics. LiquidPlanner provides a huge range of reports that

gives you comprehensive information at whatever level of detail you
choose—from portfolio to project to task.
Dashboards. This is a way to share selected analytics for a specific

project, initiative, etc. with selected team members and stakeholders.
It’s a quick way to give a clear visual representation of the key data
people need to see. Here’s an example of a dashboard that shows
project tasks, activity allocation, total project work and more for a new
product launch.
TRACK
PROJECT
PROGRESS

FUTURE
FORECASTING

Plan the future:

capacity and demand
Get the big picture. Know what you can do before you say “Can do!”
Sales manager: “Could you give me a schedule for that GUI update I
can pass on to the customer?”
Program Manager: “Sure—just give me a month to update the plan.”
The challenge
We’ve all been there: spent time building out a project plan, prioritizing
work and setting up a spider’s web of dependencies—only to go back to the
drawing board because something unexpected turned up. It gets frustrating
when you spend more time maintaining plans then executing them. What a
waste of time, right?
What matters
Ideally, you want a resource plan that isn’t just a snapshot of what everyone’s
working on right now; you need a plan that includes all future work in the
pipeline. This way you have a clear and realistic picture of what’s achievable
with the resources you have. Plus, when you have concurrent projects with
overlapping start and end dates, how else can you create a reliable schedule
FUTURE for future projects?
FORECASTING
What works
You need a plan that helps you manage your resources over an entire portfolio
of projects. You can also plug in future project work to see what’s doable over
time, and as priorities shift.

You need a view of your project world that shows you all of your commitments.
This way, you can plug in future project work to show you what’s doable as life
moves on and priorities shift. And you need to be able to do that as quickly
and as painlessly as possible.
Managing your future with LiquidPlanner

Even with a wide range of resources spread over many projects, LiquidPlanner
will automatically schedule out any number of projects and tasks based on all
the resources you have available. There’s no danger of double-booking, and
no need to manually set up or maintain a complex set of dependencies. When
you build out a project you’ll see estimated start and end dates for the work
that’s assigned based on the availability of team members and their priorities.
And, LiquidPlanner’s analytics features provide reports of work remaining, like
this remaining trend report.
Imagine being able to look into the future to know when a team member is
FUTURE
FORECASTING available to take on more work, as well as being able to more easily plan for
those times when that team member isn’t available. You can envision projects,
build them out, and execute them almost flawlessly.

WRAP UP
Effective resource management
in a multi-project environment
doesn’t have to be an ongoing
challenge! If you have the right
processes set up and a resource-
driven project management system
like LiquidPlanner, you can optimize
your resources while accommodating
shifting requirements and priorities.
When you can manage your
resources in a responsive manner
instead of a reactive one, it can feel
like practical magic.
To see how LiquidPlanner helps you

manage resources like never before, contact us!
1-888-881-2561
sales@liquidplanner.com

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THE

Know who’s doing what 12

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 2

In multi-project organizations, resources are typically fully work-loaded, assigned to a range of

In this white paper we’re going to:

Address common resource management challenges.

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 3

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 4

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 5

Set up a centralized resource pool.

Availability. To have a realistic view of your team’s availability, start

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 6

Using LiquidPlanner to allocate resources

Availability: Everyone has a default setting of eight hours of

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 7

Once this information is set up, the numbers are automatically

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 8

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 9

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 10

Using LiquidPlanner for resource leveling

Add your tasks.

Provide best/worst case effort estimates.

Assign a team member, or have them assign themselves to the task.

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 11

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 12

Know who’s doing what

Project manager: “Hey. Remind me who’s doing the user

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 13

Get resource information with LiquidPlanner.

Get a quick-scrolling view of who’s assigned to every task—in your

Filter to a single person or team to see a list of assigned tasks.

Here’s an example of a Resource Workload Report that shows how a software

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 14

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 15

Track project progress

Project Manager: “How’s your work coming along?”

Team Member: “Okay I guess.”

Project Manager: “So you’re on schedule?”

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 16

A time tracking system that people use

An easy way for people to set timers to associated tasks

A view of how much time everyone is spending on each task

Using LiquidPlanner to track progress

The timesheet is integrated into the scheduling engine.

The timers make it easy to track time to all project tasks.

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 17

Your remaining effort is always current. Whenever you log progress,

Schedule alerts. LiquidPlanner also provides some visual cues (a fire

Analytics. LiquidPlanner provides a huge range of reports that

Dashboards. This is a way to share selected analytics for a specific

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 18

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 19

Plan the future:

Program Manager: “Sure—just give me a month to update the plan.”

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 20

Managing your future with LiquidPlanner

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 21

To see how LiquidPlanner helps you

Contact us at 1.888.881.2561 or sales@liquidplanner.com | Resource Library ©2015 LiquidPlanner | 22

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